Thursday, October 20, 2011

Polish-American novelist Leslie Pietrzyk has recently started a website called Redux to showcase classic pieces of creative writing that have so far not been published online.

The fifth installment features Mark Lewandowski's essay "Tourist Season at Auschwitz," originally published inThe Gettysburg Review (1999).

I first read this essay about 3 years ago, and I thought then that I had never read anything better about what it feels like to visit Auschwitz. I had visited there in 1990 and written about the visit a number of times, about what it was like being a tourist there, but nothing I've written and nothing I've read by other writers compares to what Mark Lewandowski offers in this superb essay.

Here is an excerpt. The entire essay along with a brief piece by Mark about how he came to write the essay is available at thewebsite.

"Tourist Season at Auschwitz"

On the morning of the October day that England qualified for Italia ’90 (the World Cup soccer tournament), a small group of Englishmen were seen by some of the sports press at Auschwitz, laughing and posing as they took pictures of each other—doing the Nazi salute.Pete Davies, “All Played Out”

At Birkenau stands a mound unlike those dotting the countryside that Poles have built in remembrance of past generals and statesmen.You will not see picknickers lay out blankets on it or watch their children roll down the slopes.The Birkenau mound is a mass grave for Soviet soldiers killed by the Nazis.The bodies were packed so tightly together that they are still decomposing, and when it rains now, almost fifty years later, human grease rises to the surface and fans out through the grass in a brilliant rainbow of color.

Not far from the mound lies what looks like an ordinary pond.Bend over and peer into its depths and you might be surprised not to see a minnow or two, at least, in the water.Take a stick.Dip it into the water and movie it in circles.Soon, a whirlpool of gray ash will funnel to the surface.This pond is only one repository for the remains of the Jews.

A Polish actor told me that these were just a couple of the sights in the Auschwitz complex most tourists miss.I was with two American women I had met in a youth hostel in Kraków.This was the summer of 1990.The Berlin Wall had been down for only seven months.American tourists were still a novelty to most Poles.The actor, who spoke English fluently, spied us three on the rickety commuter train from Kraców to Oświęcim, site of Auschwitz and Birkenau.He was going to visit his mother, who was a librarian at the Auschwitz museum.

“By all means,” the actor said, “do not spend the entire afternoon in Auschwitz.After you have watched the movie and seen the major displays, go to Birkenau.The barracks still stand unmolested by museum directors.Wander the buildings and you will read messages written in coal by the inmates.You will find fragments of clothing, steel cans, rotted straw, heating stoves.Leave the barracks and follow the tracks to the gas chambers.They have not been reconstructed.They have been left the way they were found, a much more profound statement to the horrors of the Holocaust than the glitz you will find in Auschwitz.Why would the retreating soldiers bother to destroy the evidence if they were not aware of the incredible crimes they had committed against humanity?Do not believe that they felt justified or that Hitler brainwashed them.They knew their sin.You will not experience their guilt among the glassed-in cases of human hair and suitcases at Auschwitz.Only in Birkenau, the much larger of the camps, will you find what you are seeking.”

And what were we seeking? What do the hundreds of thousands who visit concentration camps every year hope to find amongst the barbed wire, the staggering statistics pasted to barracks walls, the bricks riddled with bullet holes and once saturated with blood? What world are we looking for when we pass under the gateway that tells us,Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Brings Freedom? Do we find the same closeness to history, a sense of our own place in it, that we find wandering the back alleys of Venice, touring the White House, crawling through the ruins of ancient Egypt, or gazing at the art amassed in the Vatican Museums?

Friday, October 7, 2011

Claremont McKenna College is celebrating the centenary of Milosz on Oct. 19-21, and it will feature a number of prominent writers including former US poet Laureate W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, and Polish-American writers Lillian Vallee and Piotr Florczyk.

If I were living anywhere near Claremont McKenna, I know I would be there for this one of a kind celebration. Absolutely.

To find out more about registering for the conference, please click here.

Monday, October 3, 2011

I'm going to be judging a poetry contest for Two Review A Journal of International Poetry & Creative Nonfiction.

1st Prize: $100 2nd Prize: $50 3rd Prize: $25

Prizes include publication in the 2012 issue of Two Review. All submissions considered for publication.

Here are the submission specifics:

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submit up to five (5) unpublished poems, brief bio, and $10.00 contest fee at Two Review's website. Click here.

DEADLINE

November 30th, 2011

ABOUT TWO REVIEW

Two Review is an annual independent journal of international poetry and creative nonfiction committed to publishing the best original work available. Two Review seeks writing about the modern world, its inhabitants, and the events that shape them. The editors believe art is not

a foreigner on the geopolitical landscape, and for this reason they promote work by poets, writers, and artists who are aware of more than themselves and show us the world as it celebrates and as it struggles. All topics that illuminate the human experience are welcome as long as the writing is grammatically strong and syntactically unique.

Two Review is featured at select independent booksellers across the U.S. Copies are also submitted to non-lending libraries at national poetry centers including The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Richard Hugo House in Seattle, The Poetry Center of Chicago, The Stadler Center for Poetry in Pennsylvania, and Poets House in New York City.

About Me

I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.
These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember.
Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press).